by John Metcalf
Had my job been interesting and comfortable, I’d doubtless have succumbed to the dream and lived out the rest of my life clad in tweed with vacations spent taking brass rubbings in medieval churches. But life at Bluebell Secondary Modern and the Eastmill Reception Centre was neither interesting nor comfortable. The staff were caricatures, the headmasters clinically insane. The pupils ranged from the merely drooling to the psychopathically loutish.
Bluebell Secondary Modern was the sort of school where homework was never assigned because the pupils returned with notes written on torn brown bag paper which said:
Dear teacher,
He have not done his sums because
its bad for his “nerves”
Thanking you, I Remain
Signed Mary Brown (Mrs).
The remedial mornings were divided by school dinner from the remedial afternoons.
From a utensil of medieval aspect and proportions, greasy stew studded with emerald processed peas was ladled by the grubby monitor. The stew was followed by steamed pudding and aluminum jugs of custard topped by a thickening skin.
Leaving was no difficulty.
Return to Canada was a relief. Canada, after England, seemed filled with rising hope. Expo 67 in Montreal marked some kind of high point. My writing career was soon to get under way. My daughter was born in 1969. Looking back now, I would say that the euphoria everyone seemed to be feeling began to fall apart in about 1975.
I suffered from the delusion that Canada could be improved. Since then, I feel that year by year Canada has been in continuous cultural decline. Our schools are a disaster. Our public life is a grim farce; the present minister of defence was unaware of Dieppe and confuses Vimy with Vichy.
The leaching away of knowledge, taste, and sophistication might be well suggested in this June 1989 Ottawa Citizen column by Marjorie Nichol.
Pierre Juneau, the retiring president of the CBC, has had an eventful public career. It is doubtful, though, that Juneau will ever forget the events of the afternoon of May 24, 1989.
On that day Juneau appeared, probably for the last time, before the Commons committee on communications and culture, which examines CBC policy and spending.
The main topic of discussion, not surprisingly, was the draconian cuts to the CBC budget meted out in the new federal budget. Over the next four years $140 million will be lopped off the corporation’s budget.
Juneau painted an extremely bleak picture of the CBC’s future, predicting that “a slaughter” will be required to keep the broadcasting behemoth afloat.
Committee members badgered the president to say how he would deal with the corporation’s fiscal crises. He demurred, stating repeatedly that salvaging the CBC will be a task for its next president to be appointed next month by Brian Mulroney.
The newly appointed chairman of this prestigious Commons committee is Felix Holtmann, a two-term Conservative MP from the Manitoba riding of Portage-Interlake.
What follows is a verbatim excerpt from that committee meeting.
Chairman Holtmann: “. . . I have listened to CBC radio, CBC television back home and you have programming that sometimes goes on for hours without any advertising in it at all. Either there are no listeners or you are afraid to advertise. I do not know what the darn reason is.
“But I think if you advertised even a little you would wake some people up who were listening to some of these long, drawn-out musicians from some other country . . .”
John Harvard (Lib-Winnipeg/St. James): “You are talking radio?”
Ian Waddell (NDP-Port Moody/Coquitlam): “What is it, Bach or something like that?”
Chairman Holtmann: “Something like that. Why should they get to listen to that for nothing?”
Harvard: “Nothing?”
Chairman Holtmann: “Why are you afraid to advertise and recover, well, the money. Of course the taxpayers are paying for it, if you are not advertising. Why are you not throwing an advertisement in every once in a while to pay for that programming?”
Harvard: “My God.”
Pierre Juneau: “Mr. Chairman, since I said CBC management would present to the CBC board a list of every possibility, no doubt that one will be included. I would not call it an option, because I personally would be against it.”
Chairman Holtmann: “You personally would be against it?”
Juneau: “Yes, I would.”
Chairman Holtmann: “I do not understand that.”
Juneau: “I will explain why, but never mind.
As I said, I will not be there when the decision is made . . . There is a condition of licence, and if you read the Broadcasting Act, a condition of licence is like law. There is a condition of licence that prohibits advertising on CBC radio except in very, very few cases . . .”
Chairman Holtmann: “. . . You said you are against it; I suppose your board is against it too, or something like that.”
Juneau: “I would say the majority of the board are.”
Chairman Holtmann: “What is the rationale for being against something like that? What is cultural to Canada’s culture to listen to Beethoven? Is it because you are interfering with our culture? You guys have lost me on that one.”
At the close of the committee hearing Chairman Holtmann confessed that culture and communications are not his first area of expertise or interest.
As he put it, “Hogs and cows are things I have been associated with more.” He then wished Juneau “good luck in any retirement that you get involved with.”
But it is not simply living in cultural desolation which is turning my thoughts again towards England. It is the pain, more heartfelt every year, of not living in history.
The English past still grips me. The parish church, Norman, with its yew trees and lichened tombstones, the pub, the village green or square, behind the high stone walls the manor house . . . I am still a captive of the dream.
Momentous as getting married and moving to England and then returning to Canada had been, something equally momentous had occurred in my artistic life. In 1964 I had happened upon a book which exploded upon me. It overwhelmed me. I was consumed by this book. It was so big, so perfect, so merciless that I could live inside it. The book was Richard Yates’s story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. Years later Esquire wrote of him, “Richard Yates is one of America’s least famous great writers.”
The book had been published in 1962. It was a first book of stories. The author was older than me but not by much. The stories were dazzling. It wasn’t the writing itself which excited me so much. Yates had a simple and unadorned style. What excited me was that someone had produced a work of art which was within striking distance of perfection and they’d done it not in 1941 but now, today. The book opened up the possibility that someone else could attain the same distinction. It gave me a mark to aim at. It also validated the entire genre for me, made me feel intensely that a lifetime spent in achieving just one such book was more than justified. With at this point just a handful of juvenile scribbling to my name, I consciously dedicated the rest of my life to achieving that book and to the service of literature in general in my time and place.
This zeal may sound priggish but I was in a state of exhilaration. Yates made me feel what Philip Larkin felt on hearing Sidney Bechet:
On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.
By the end of 1999 all of Richard Yates’s novels and story collections were out of print. Writing of him in the Boston Review, the novelist Stewart O’Nan said:
Across his career he was consistently well-reviewed in all the major places, and four of his novels were selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club, yet he never sold more that 12,000 copies of any one book in hardback.
If his work was neglected during his lifetime, after his death it has practically disappeared. Of the tens of tho
usands of titles crammed into the superstores, not one is his . . .
To write so well and then to be forgotten is a terrifying legacy. I always think that if I write well enough, the people in my books—the world of those books—will somehow survive. In time the shoddy and trendy work will fall away and the good books will rise to the top. It’s not reputation that matters, since reputations are regularly pumped up by self-serving agents and publicists and booksellers, by the star machinery of Random House and the New Yorker, what matters is what the author has achieved in the work, on the page. Once it’s between the covers, they can’t take it away from you; they have to acknowledge its worth. As a writer, I have to believe that.
This is the mystery of Richard Yates: how did a writer so well-respected—even loved—by his peers, a writer capable of moving his readers so deeply, fall to all intents out of print, and so quickly? How is it possible that an author whose work defined the lostness of the Age of Anxiety as deftly as Fitzgerald’s did that of the Jazz Age, an author who influenced American literary icons like Raymond Carver and André Dubus, among others, an author so forthright and plainspoken in his prose and choice of characters, can now be found only by special order or in the dusty, floor-level end of the fiction section in secondhand stores? And how come no one knows this? How come no one does anything about it?
THE YEARS WITH ROSS
In 1966 i was contacted by Earle Toppings, then senior editor at the Ryerson Press. He was working on an anthology entitled Modern Canadian Stories selected and edited by Giose Rimanelli and Roberto Ruberto. Earle Birney contributed a foreword and had been influential behind the scenes. They wished to include two of my stories previously published in Prism International. This was an important publication for me for a variety of reasons. The book represented only the fourth time since Raymond Knister’s Canadian Short Stories in 1928 that Canadian story writers had been anthologized. I had been placed in the company of people whose work interested me—Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Ethel Wilson, and Irving Layton. It also introduced me to Earle Toppings, who became a friend. Lastly, it had given me an entrée to the Ryerson Press.
I used to send Earle stories which he read and discussed with me but wisely refused to publish. He thought I needed a book from a smaller press first. He took it upon himself to take a group of my stories to Stan Bevington at Coach House. Stan accepted the book and I was set to become the first collection of fiction that Coach House published. I knew nothing much about Coach House or Stan Bevington other than that he was a honcho in the Toronto counterculture. After a couple of months had gone by I phoned Stan to inquire about progress. Everything, apparently, was fine, just fine, but there hadn’t been any, well, you know, man, actual physical progress, though . . .
About three anxious months later, still no news, I phoned again. My tentative questions were followed by a silence as of profound thought.
“Hello?” I said.
“Look, man,” said Stan, “if you’re going to hassle me I’m not doing the book.”
And he didn’t.
My writing life was absorbing me to the point that I realized I could no longer afford to work full-time. I resigned from Northmount High School and looked about for part-time work. Just before the term ended I was visited by the board’s consultant in English, Charles Rittenhouse. Charles had been very active in amateur theatre—always a bad thing—and was given to gesture and noisy recitation. He was related by marriage to the Holgate family and had several of Edwin Holgate’s prosaic canvases in his apartment. He sat on the edge of my desk and said that he considered me the most interesting young teacher in the system and asked me to work with him on five textbooks for which he had a contract with J. M. Dent and Sons.
The series was called Wordcraft and books 1 to 3 were written by Charles, me, and Juliette Dowling. Wordcraft Junior and Senior were written by Charles and me alone. Actually, largely by me with Charles acting as taskmaster. The purpose of the books was to interest children in the history of words, to build vocabulary, and to provide exercises in precise usage.
We wrote Wordcraft 2 and 3 in 1968 and they and other textbooks I compiled were to prove very important in my writing life. They sold astonishingly well and brought in just enough in royalties each year to persuade me that I had enough “base” money to risk one more year without full-time employment.
I had also been earning money by editing school text editions with notes, questions, and exercises for Bellhaven House. I prepared editions of The Razor’s Edge, The Daughter of Time, and Flight of the Phoenix. These appeared in 1967 and 1968. Also in 1968, I put together with Gordon Callaghan, a fellow teacher, a textbook called Rhyme and Reason to teach children how to read poetry. Wordcraft 1 appeared in 1969. In 1970 Gordon and I compiled a poetry anthology for high school use called Salutation. Also in 1970 Rittenhouse and I put out Wordcraft Senior. Again in 1970 I published Sixteen by Twelve. The idea behind this old warhorse was simple. I chose twelve writers and asked them to write a piece about writing to accompany their story or stories in the book. I wrote brief biographies and included an informal photo of the writer. These devices seemed to give the book a certain intimacy and personality. The writers I chose were Morley Callaghan, Hugh Garner, Margaret Laurence, Hugh Hood, Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro, Shirley Faessler, Alden Nowlan, George Bowering, David Helwig, myself, and Ray Smith.
The book is still in print and still selling well after more than thirty years. It ought to have been scrapped and updated years ago. When I did attempt to present different writers in a similar collection called New Worlds in 1980—such writers as Merna Summers, Alden Nowlan, W. P. Kinsella, Jack Hodgins, C. D. Minni, Norman Levine, and Terrence Heath—the book didn’t sell well and the reports from the McGraw-Hill Ryerson salesmen were that the teachers hadn’t heard of any of these writers.
Year after year Sixteen by Twelve has underwritten my fiction and criticism. It typically produces four thousand dollars a year. The Dent Wordcraft books used to bring in fifteen hundred to two thousand a year but sales are more or less finished; I suspect the books are now too challenging for the students’ dwindling abilities.
It is for me rather saddening to look at Sixteen by Twelve today. Seven of those twelve writers are now dead, four of the seven from drink. Given Canada, perhaps not surprising. Frederick Philip Grove wrote: “There is no greater curse that can befall a man than to be afflicted with artistic leanings, in Canada.”
That comma might be the best thing he ever wrote.
The royalties rolled in as a delightful extra. The motivation for compiling these and later books was less financial than educational. I was at that time interested in teaching and I believed that Canadian children ought to be in contact with Canadian art. Sixteen by Twelve was, apparently, the first Canadian textbook of Canadian stories ever. Gordon Callaghan and I put together Rhyme and Reason and Salutation simply so we’d have intelligent material to teach. Very little infrastructure had been put into place by the early sixties and we both felt a need to shape and civilize. Only years later did we realize that it was like throwing stones into a bog.
In 1963 W. H. Auden wrote: “The dominions . . . are for me tiefste Provinz, places which have produced no art and are inhabited by the kind of person with whom I have least in common.”
Difficult not to concur.
I have often thought about this surge of publishing at the beginning of my career and of the textbooks that came later—Kaleidoscope: Canadian Stories (1972), The Narrative Voice (1972), The Speaking Earth: Canadian Poetry (1973), Here and Now: Best Canadian Stories (1977), Stories Plus (1979), New Worlds (1980), Making It New (1982), The New Story Writers (1982) and Canadian Classics (1993).
Had I remained in England a similar surge of publishing would not have occurred because I could not have imagined it. Textbooks in England were written by heads of department in famous public schools or by lecturers in departments of e
ducation and certainly not by lowly toilers at Bluebell Secondary Modern. There was besides a resource pool of thousands of educated minds on which publishers could draw. Also to the point, there was no need of new textbooks.
Canada offered me the freedom to do anything I could imagine. The negative side of this freedom was that it was a freedom which arose from ignorance and indifference. There was certainly little competition. In the sixties Canada was an intellectual and creative wasteland with a large percentage of its population functionally illiterate.
Royalties fluctuated and it wasn’t possible to rely on them and so a part-time job was necessary. Irving Layton suggested to me that I try Ross High School. At that time it occupied the upper floor of a takeout Bar BQ chicken joint on Decarie near Vezina. It was a private institution that catered to students who had failed in the state schools or who were disaffected, stoned, or simply idle. Classes were small as were the four rooms into which they were crammed.
Mr. Ross also had a sideline of rich immigrant students mainly from Taiwan and India.
“What I am not understanding, sir, is the whereabouts of your motorcar.”
Preceding me as heads of the English department had been the proletarian layabout poet Bryan McCarthy, author of Smoking the City, layabout novelist John Mills, and Irving Layton. Whenever I asked Harry Ross for a raise he always replied, “Who do you think you are? Irving Layton?”
Myrna once told me that years before I knew her, McCarthy, a boozehound and notorious wastrel, had taught her dancing “by the binary method.” I’ve never had the moral courage to press her on what “the binary method” actually entailed.
I sketched this curious school in a story called “The Years in Exile” and again fiction feels more accurate than fact.